TVSquad

When Ashton Kutcher, Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, Elle Macpherson and the rest of the panel for Kutcher's CW show The Beautiful Life, I was figuring the panel would field nothing but questions about Mischa Barton, given the recent publicity over her hospitalization and other personal issues. Surprisingly, though, the critics actually wanted to focus on the show itself, which is about the lives of young models and how they deal with the various pressures of that lifestyle.

However, in the middle of the panel, a Barton question did come up. Kutcher was quick to defend the actress, saying she was "never unavailable for a day of work." With all the young people in the cast, he thinks the "good thing about Mischa is that she's done it before," and can provide guidance.

Like I said, most of the questions to the panel were about the show's influences and what direction they'd want to go in. Kutcher started his career as a model, but according to him, when he was a teenager in Iowa, he didn't even know male models existed. "I thought the Marlboro Man was a real guy," he said.

He told the story of how he got into modeling in Iowa, which involves him leaving college and then finding his way back to his hometown, then going back to college. Not all models are as lucky as he was, though, to go straight into acting. A lot of them are typecast as models and that's about it.

Kutcher, he of the three million Twitter followers, was asked how he thinks the world of TV and digital are going to fare in the future. "I think that the two mediums will eventually merge into one," he said. "I don't think it's one or the other. I think it's both, and I think our goal is to be there when they merge and already have an established
understanding, awareness of that space." His web series, KatalystHQ, already has an audience of nine million. "A lot of networks would actually love to have that number," he said.